With this campus and our society, there's still a bro culture where to be a dude, you have to be tough and mean.

I was in high school in college in the mid 80s, and people would say "That's where gay people go, we don't want to go there."

Why not? I didn't have the guts to say that because I had to fit in.

We’d be sitting and having beers with the boys who are saying, "I'm gonna go bang that b**** over there" -- all this other stuff.

People are laughing and somebody else joins and he's gonna do “something better” and out of six people, a few are laughing, some maybe feel the same way, and if they don't, they're certainly not going to say it.

But there might actually be a wingnut in there that thinks "I can do that."

So there's a lot of guilt that travels with me, because I didn’t say anything about that. I didn't say, "Hey, what if that girl doesn't want to be involved in that?"

I have a hard time with the word "brave" – I didn't want anything to shine a spotlight on how I might be queer.

We didn't have the language for it back in those days. We didn't have phones. We didn't have computers. We didn't have any at this.

The model Caroline Cossey who worked under the name Tula, was in a Bond movie and was stealth. No one knew she was trans and she got outed by paparazzi. Her life was immediately turned upside down and I'm thinking "I don't know if I'll ever be able to do this."

It’s similar with sports now – we want to put ourselves out there, but there's apprehension there. With my students, I’m trying to understand: Is this apprehension there because there's a lot of work to it and time commitment? Or is it because they don't want to deal with the bullshit?

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]